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Lowell Folk Fest: 3 decades and still going strong

By Grant Welker, gwelker@lowellsun.com

Updated:
07/28/2016 02:35:34 PM EDT

Spectators dance to the Polka Country Musicians at JFK Plaza in downtown Lowell at the 2015 Lowell Folk Festival. The streets should be filled again with revelers from far and wide as the city hosts its 30th annual festival. See video and a slide show at lowellsun.com. SUN file photo/Julia Malakie

LOWELL -- For people like Pauline Golec and Jane Duffley and their crew at the Polish National Home Association, the Lowell Folk Festival doesn't start Friday afternoon.

It starts at least a week earlier, when the first of 5,000 to 6,000 pierogi are handmade, frozen, and ready to go when the party begins Friday night. They toiled on Tuesday making cabbage and on Wednesday making rosettes, a light fried pastry. Kielbasa and other Polish mainstays are all made on Colburn Street, too.

"You get to appreciate more and more the sheer army of people who put this on," said Golec, who has been volunteering since Lowell's biggest annual event was the Regatta Festival in the 1970s. She serves as the ethnic chair of the festival, overseeing all food tables.

It's that army of volunteers, a team of committed partners and a reliable annual crowd in the hundreds of thousands that have brought the Lowell Folk Festival to its 30th year in the city.

The festival began not with its own Lowell identity but as the temporary home of the National Folk Festival. Lowell hosted the event for three years starting in 1987 before local partners decided starting in 1990 to make the event the Lowell Folk Festival, and to hold it each summer.

The Lowell Folk Festival now calls itself the longest-running free folk festival in the country.

While the three-year span hosting the national festival was successful, holding a long-running annual event wasn't a given.

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The National Folk Festival rotates in three-year terms, hoping that the host city will carry on the tradition.

In some cities, that doesn't happen. In Lowell, it did.

"At the end of ''89, there were quite a lot of meetings on, could we keep it alive? Do people care?" said Peter Aucella, then the city's planning and development director and now an assistant superintendent with the Lowell National Historical Park.

"A lot of people in the community were hellbent that it was going to continue," he said.

Members of the Polish Cultural Committee along with volunteers were cooking up some rosettes on Wednesday to have at the Lowell Folk Festival. Rosettes are a form of Polish fried dough known as Chrusts. Collecting up some of the finished rosettes as they were being made on Wednesday is Manya Matyka.
SUN/JOHN LOVE

The Lowell Folk Festival has never veered far off its successful formula.

Boarding House Park wasn't built until 1990, and there were fewer food booths at the beginning. Some ideas, like a performance at South Common, have been sidelined. Lowell wasn't as much of a draw then, without hockey bringing people to the Tsongas Center or minor league baseball to LeLacheur Park.

But the festival came not too long after Lowell National Historical Park was created in 1978, with the momentum from restoring mills and spotlighting Lowell's history carrying over to creating events that would draw thousands downtown. What has endured is the simple idea of bringing so many kinds of food and music together at the same place.

Members of the Polish Cultural Committee along with volunteers were cooking up some rosettes on Wednesday to have at the Lowell Folk Festival. Rosettes are a form of Polish fried dough known as Chrusts.
SUN/JOHN LOVE

Two factors have made the festival work for three decades, said Craig Gates, who is in his sixth year running the event for the National Park Service.

The event's partners make it all possible, he said. "You can't beat them."

"The other reason is it's free," he added.

Arthur Sutcliffe, chairman of the Lowell Festival Foundation, a key partner in the event, attributes the festival's success to the continuity of those involved, including the foundation, the National Park and a team of volunteers.

"We've dedicated 30 years to this," he said. "Their heart and soul is in it, and that's what keeps it exciting and vibrant."

As the festival has grown, it's become Lowell's biggest annual event and one that draws from far outside the area.

Making some rosettes is MaryAnn Szufnarowski on Wednesday at the Polish National Home on Coburn Street in Lowell.
SUN/JOHN LOVE

It's gained an international flair, made most clear by taking a look at the food offerings: Greek, Polish, Jamaican, Laotian, Liberian, Brazilian, Nigerian and several Asian nations.

Surveys have shown that just as many people attend the festival for the food as do for the entertainment. Musicians come from all over, but the delicacies at all those food booths are made in kitchens right in Lowell.

Duffley, part of the small Polish group and a second-generation Pole, said she sees the food offerings as a chance to maintain part of her heritage.

"We started in my grandmother's kitchen making pierogi," she said. At first, they wore traditional Polish outfits but then decided it wasn't worth trying to keep from getting them dirty while preparing all that food.

Like Golec, Duffley has been volunteering since before the first National Folk Festival came to town.

"We continued," Duffley said of maintaining the tradition through the various annual events. "It was really wonderful."

Golec tallied up the numbers that illustrate just how much volunteers contribute to the folk fest: 800 volunteers last year, working 13,780 hours preparing, cooking, cleaning, or anything else that was needed.

"I like to think there's always that can-do spirit in Lowell," she said.

A few key figures were called instrumental in getting the festival going. The late Patrick Mogan, called by some the father of the Lowell National Historical Park, took what could have been Lowell's shortcomings and made them assets, said Mehmed Ali, the city's historian who ran the festival in 2005.

The city's crumbling mills? He saw them as a way to showcase the city's historic preservation. All the city's ethnic groups were touted as a signal of the city's diversity.

"Let's celebrate Lowell for what it is," Ali said, summing up Mogan's idea.

Several who have been involved in the festival all along recalled a visit by Joe Wilson, then the director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. Wilson came to Lowell, took a look at where performances could be held, and chose the city for a three-year run starting in 1987.

"There was something about Lowell that he had a keen interest in," Sutcliffe said.

Wilson was named a living legend by the American Folklife Center and received a distinguished achievement award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2009.

The National Folk Festival has also thrived in the years since moving on from Lowell. In September, it will hold its 76th annual iteration in Greensboro, N.C.

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